


A Place For Me Beside You

by multipurposetoolguy



Category: Dredd (2012), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (only mentioned briefly and none of our boys), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Childhood Trauma, Coping with trauma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Family and Identity Issues, Gen, Healthy Relationships, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Info-Dumping, M/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, background kylux mentioned, changed techie's name to theodore bc its cute and close enough!, healthy crying, just a bit, minor depictions of violence, mitaka cameos for a hot second, vague approximations of government processes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 18:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13254567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multipurposetoolguy/pseuds/multipurposetoolguy
Summary: “So, you nervous about tonight?”Theo freezes, a string of closed parenthesis trailing across his screen before he takes his hands away from the keys. Mattknows,he knows what’s happening today, that he doesn’t-can’ttalk about- “A-About. About, ah, what?” He pushes out instead. Matt knows, he wouldn’t bring it up. Heknows.--Some not-so-nice things from his past that Theo would have much preferred stay buried come clawing to the surface, but luckily he doesn't have to face them alone. Not anymore.





	A Place For Me Beside You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theweddingofthefoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theweddingofthefoxes/gifts).



> It's been a hot minute but I bring fic!! 
> 
> very special fic too, as it's birthday fic for my dear sweet muffin Eva!! She requested techienician hurt/comfort, and i gotta deliver the goods!! I hope you like it sweet peach, hope its got enough comfort to combat the angst! I'm posting this five days LATE like a loser but everyone go wish her a happy late bday if you can!! <3
> 
> a few notes before we start, I've changed Techie's name to Theodore so that Matt can call him Teddy, which sounds close enough and I needed him to have a real name for this fic and I am not a fan of his canon name so! Hope it's still smooth to read! 
> 
> also there is a brief mention of a character death, Techie's unnamed mother and not in any sort of detail aside from mentioning an illness/homelessness, so tread lightly if you're sensitive to that subject matter. 
> 
> I also fudged the details on a particular government process and how it's normally carried out, I'm aware it's not exactly correct lol.
> 
> real quick a thank you to my beebs and lovely beta [Maddy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Droneshard/works), and with that said, enjoy!! <3

Theo plunks down into his squeaky old rolling chair and heaves a breath. Armitage is really going to have to cool it with the portions of the lunches he’s been packing for him lately. It’s sweet, more than that it’s-  _ really  _ sweet of him, but there’s just no way he can put away  _ that  _ much risotto and chicken breast on a daily basis. (Not to mention that that’s just on the wrong side of too fancy to be eating in the cafeteria of a modest IT building). He’s had to start giving half of it away just so it wouldn’t go to waste. 

Which is why, as he settles into his chair and jiggles his mouse to wake his monitor back up, he slides a mostly full green tupperware container around the divider and onto Matt’s desk. 

Once he lets go it disappears around the edge of the corkboard wall all on its own, and he hears an excited murmuring like a goblin from a Tolkien book who’s just found something precious. 

He hears the lid snap off, then a deep inhale that trails back out into, “Oooh my god. Mushroom chicken?”

Theo grins to himself, hidden by the divider. “Yup.” 

Matt makes a sound that would probably get HR snooping around their station for browser history inspection and tucks in, brandishing the fresh plastic fork that Theo put in there himself. “Guh, fuck yes. Kiss your brother for me will you,” He says around a mouthful of creamy rice.

Theo wrinkles his nose. “No thanks. If he found out I was sharing with other kids at the lunch table he’d probably stop using the pricey high-end ingredients.” He clicks open the program he’d been working out the kinks with, reminds himself to not check his email. 

“In that case never say anything to him about it, ever. Please, I beg you.” He’s getting less intelligible as he scarfs the microwaved meal, and Theo just hums in acknowledgement and leaves him to it. 

They sit in relaxed relative silence for a minute, the  _ tack-tack-tack  _ of Theo’s keyboard mingling with the scraping of Matt’s fork against the bottom of the tupperware. He slides it back around the divider into its customary spot on Theo’s desk, then sits up in his chair so that he’s peering over at him, only visible from the bottom edge of his wire frames-up. 

“So, you nervous about tonight?”

Theo freezes, a string of closed parenthesis trailing across his screen before he takes his hands away from the keys. Matt  _ knows,  _ he knows what’s happening today, that he doesn’t-  _ can’t  _ talk about- “A-About. About, ah, what?” He pushes out instead. Matt knows, he wouldn’t bring it up. He  _ knows.  _

“For Game of Thrones! Teddy, I haven’t shut up about the Hound for a solid week, you know this.” 

The breath leaves his body punched and stuttery in relief but when he meets Matt’s eyes he’s giving Theo a meaningful look. He knows. 

“No,” he starts, relaxing his face from panic mode. “I’m not nervous, I’ve read the books Matt. I know what happens for the next, like, four episodes.” 

Matt holds his eyes a minute longer before rolling them away with a playful huff. “And  _ somebody  _ won’t tell me what happens to Joffrey, even when bribed with my special brownies.”

Theo snorts, erasing each extra parenthesis with deliberate clicks of the backspace bar to get his breathing back to normal.

“The books are  _ literally  _ on a shelf like, three feet from your bed. No one is stopping you from picking them up,  _ you have the power.”  _ The last he says with an affected tone and a gentle shake of one raised fist, brandishing an invisible sword and an invisible blonde bowl-cut. “Also you know how to use Google.”

Matt huffs and clicks into his own desktop, booting up whatever he’d been working on before food grabbed his brittle attention away. 

He clicks the button twice more and all extra figures have been erased, back at square one, starting fresh. He closes his eyes, breathes in deep, lets it out as slow as he can. 

Gently he reaches out with his foot, sneaks it under the four inches or so gap between the floor and the divider that continues underneath their shared cubicle. He presses his slip-ons to Matt’s beat up white Chucks instead of using up the rest of their workday carefully picking out words he could maybe hopefully use to thank Matt for understanding, for helping him through his bullshit. 

Matt snickers to himself and Theo’s monitor dings with a new IM, some meme about the new reworks done to a character on League of Legends. It’s funny, and accurate, and he laughs too. 

Matt presses back with his foot and doesn’t move it away again.

 

\--------------

 

They’re sitting at their desks quietly clicking away at their own lines of code an hour later, still touching gently at the ankles, when Dopheld -who sits a few cubicles over- switches on his desk radio. It’s set to some talk radio news station, and Theo feels the inside of his skin crawl with panic.  

_ “-rts set to decide today on the status of parole for drug trafficker and ex-gang leader Madeline Madrigal, convicted in 2012 for those and additional charges of multiple counts of homicide, armed robbery, and child endangerment. While unlikely given the case details deputies say it is possible that-” _

Before the over-intoned voice of the reporter can continue and tear down all of Theo’s carefully constructed mental barriers Matt is jerking to his feet, rattling their desks and careening into Dopheld’s cubicle. Theo can’t see what happens then, hunching over as small as he can get and trying desperately not to pull his hair out (he’d been doing  _ so well,  _ why  _ now- _ ) but he hears the static-y hiss of the radio being switched off before silence falls heavy like a cleaver into cold flesh. 

“Matt what, dude, come on, I just wanted to see if I have to fight traffic on the I-9.” Dopheld sounds dejected but resigned, which was his default emotion as far as he and Matt knew. 

“Sorry man, I uh, I was really feeling a power ballad to round out the work day, y’know?” Matt is trying to sound nonchalant and not like he just sprinted across the office to touch another person’s radio, and Theo can feel the backs of his eyes burning. He can hear the thing flip back on as Matt fumbles through stations, settling on an overplayed Bon Jovi song and cranking the volume, making a handful of techs nearby groan. 

The Bon Jovi song ends and a Tears for Fears song starts before Matt comes back to their corner, and Theo is already standing to meet him, one fist rubbing angrily at his eyes so hard he sees stars. He’s pressing his phone gently into Matt’s chest, and the way Matt’s looking at him asks  _ are you alright?  _ and Theo can’t possibly think of a way to look back at him that can accurately reply  _ no, but it would be worse if you weren’t here.  _

He settles for counting the laces in Matt’s shoes, hair hanging around his face. He taps the phone against Matt’s polo, not trusting himself to open his mouth and afraid of what wet needy words might come out. His fingers are itching and suddenly so are the arches of his feet inside his shoes and the exact spot on his back that he can’t reach. He can’t be here right now, and he can’t be alone either. 

Matt, stubborn and brash but  _ caring  _ and  _ aggressively supportive  _ Matt, takes Theo’s phone gently and nods, somehow completely removed from yet on top of Theo’s fragile and wavering playing-card-tower psyche. 

“Need to check?”

“Yeah.” His voice is hoarse like he’s been overusing it, but he knows he hasn’t, doesn’t. He hopes he’s been quiet in his sleep, he really doesn’t want to have to tell his therapist that the night terrors are back. She’d say it wasn’t but it would feel like defeat.

“Got it,” Matt says, almost frustratingly amenable, and slips Theo’s phone into the pocket of his khakis. “No checking.”

Words continue to be inadequate so Theo just nods, and walks too quickly across the office and into the men’s room down the hall. 

It’s blissfully empty, and he leans heavily on both hands in front of one of the sinks, chest heaving. 

So much of his life is tainted with the greasy red of her, oily fingerprints smeared on all his edges, and now even his place of work is stained. His safe space full of numbers and sequence and order and he’s hiding in the bathroom all but praying to not have a panic attack just from hearing her goddamn  _ name.  _ He feels like a paper towel dipped in ink, ichor running up his veins and soaking him to the core. 

The thought makes his stomach twist and he jerks the tap on and splashes cold water into his face for a long minute before looking up to meet his own gaze in the mirror. His eyes catch as they often do on the knotted flesh high on his left temple, creeping into his hairline. A sloppy signature carved into him with the knife she always kept in her bra. It bled more than the sloppy cigarette brand on his neck had, but didn’t hurt as much by half. Blood had run into his eyes and his nose and his mouth and he swore he could taste it for at least a week, after. He’d been twelve at the time.

With her marks on his skin she might as well be standing behind him, leering through stained too-sharp teeth, and he feels sick. 

He winds a hand into his hair and pulls, the tension and pain trying to ground him while at the same time draping over to cover the parts of him that aren’t his. His breath is coming quicker, shallower, stuttering like a busted muffler as he tries to gulp down a full breath, and it’s not  _ fair,  _ it’s been five  _ god damn years  _ and he knows it won’t ever go away but  _ god  _ if he could just be okay and stay together for  _ one fucking week-  _

He can’t breath, and he looks down at where his other hand grips the counter so tightly all the color has drained from it; he stops. 

A little string of beads that’s lived on his wrist for the past eight months glints in the light as he trembles, and the yellows and oranges and blues seem to worm right past the panic in his brain and the effect is instantaneous. His breathing slows, his other hand loosens in his hair. He breathes in, he breathes out. 

He’d come home from therapy one day back in July in an unusually good mood, and told Matt about the ground they’d covered in grounding oneself in one’s emotions and circumventing spikes of panic. His therapist had suggested counting things around him (which sometimes helped) or carrying a small trinket with him to take out and focus on when the stress was building. He’d come home full of hope and laden with craft supplies from the dollar store, figuring he and Matt could make a night of silly arts and crafts and hopefully come away from it with a new tool in his anti-anxiety-bullshit arsenal. Once Theo had explained though Matt had taken it very seriously, and sat cross-legged and hunched over torn into packets of beads in intense concentration until he handed Theo the bracelet he wears now, strung with his favorite colors. “ _ So you can count them, or whatever. The beads. That’ll help, right?”  _ he’d said. His face, usually hard lines and often accused of ‘resting’ and a certain adjective, was so open and earnest that Theo hadn’t said a word, just gently slipped the beads around his wrist and buried his face in Matt’s hoodie. 

He hasn’t taken them off since. 

He slides it down his hand until he’s holding it between his fingers, counting the beads around and around until he can stomach to meet his reflection once more. When he does he doesn’t look quite as wrecked as he feels, which is a huge relief. His cheeks are red and his eyes even redder from squeezing them tight and forcing the tears back in, his hair is a mess, but it usually is anyway. He sees the gnarled scar peeking out on his temple, the brand on his neck, but he sees the bracelet too, reflected in the glass, and the now slightly wrinkled patterned tie that Armitage bought him last week, on a whim. It’s pale blue with tiny cacti patterned all across it, he’d said it reminded him of ‘his prickly boyfriend’.

He sees her marks on him, he always will, but he sees the marks of those who love him also, and the opposing forces almost seem to balance out and make him feel like a normal, un-fucked-up human person. He takes in a slow deep breath. Tucks the beads back up his wrist, stands up straighter. Breathes out, long and even. Fuck her, Matt’s out there waiting for him. 

When he gets back to his desk after a few more face-fulls of water half the lights in the office are off, alternating panels draping the room in the welcoming dim that heralds the end of the work day. Matt is clearing out his files for the day in a rushed flurry of clicks as he does everyday, leaving things till the end, and the familiarity of it helps put Theo back to rights. 

On his own desk there’s a piece of masking tape over the email icon of his desktop, and his phone is waiting for him just beside his keyboard. There’s a sticky-note pressed to the darkened screen, the word ‘dessert?’ and a wobbly doodle of an ice cream cone scribbled out in blue ink. 

Theo bites his lip when his smile starts to give his tear ducts ideas, and he carefully peels off the note and slips it into the top drawer of his desk, nestling it with dozens and dozens more like it, collected and kept close. 

Matt hops up from his chair then with a satisfied sigh and turns soft and hopeful eyes onto him. “Ready Teddy-bear?”

Theo snorts and rolls his eyes, nods, and breathes easy. Sticks his tongue out at him for good measure. He reaches for his coat, and as they walk out of the building hand in hand, he doesn’t itch to check his phone, not even once. 

 

\--

 

Theo wishes he could say that he’d been different, before her, less erratic and blinking-too-much-too-fast, but somehow he knows like he knows the color of his hair or that he can’t stand the taste of raw tomatoes that he’s always been this way; slightly off, out of sync, like some sort of malfunctioning android trying to pass itself off as someone flesh and blood and normal. 

He doesn’t remember his mother. He knows he had one, briefly, until the sun came up over the crumbling East Side hospital building and the nurses took the little bracelet off his chubby little arm and handed him to a social worker. If he cried on the drive to his first foster home he thinks it’s probably because he could feel the distance growing between his tiny body and the only person on earth who ever loved him, and who fate was so cruel as to take him away from. In reality he would’ve cried regardless, no more than two days old and already unable to keep his chubby little hands out of his eyes. 

He was back at the orphanage a year later, his tissue paper immune system racking the bills up too high for his new forever home. Through the next three families and the next seven years, he always hoped his real mother would come knocking on the door; hair like spun honey just like his and hands that were soft and empty, room exactly enough for him and nothing and no one else. 

He found out years later that she’d given him up to spare him her homelessness, and that she’d died of tuberculosis two years later, under an awning outside a Wallgreens. 

Nevertheless, eight year old Theodore H. (the name in his file, he was never quite sure who gave it to him) tried not to lose hope that she’d find him, and he was planning on asking his social worker to help him track her down, if she had time between helping other kids be happy. But then he turned nine, and was adopted by a woman named Madrigal. He was smart enough not to hope for anything, after that. 

He was there for eleven years before CPS finally caught her bloody-handed and had her arrested, most of his time spent huddled in a room with five other kids and using a near-extinct beat up old computer to do whatever ‘Ma-Ma’ asked him to so she’d have as few reasons as possible to come in and hit them. He was filthy, scarred and skittish, and twenty years old when he staggered out of her greasy apartment blinking into the too-bright-ness of the outside world. 

With no family on record and no more systems left to age out of, he let his new social worker set him up for government benefits and settled into a shelter, a flyer for an IT job full of push-pin holes pulled from a corkboard in the lobby clutched in his hands. Somehow he stuttered through the interview, with bandages on his arms and his hair in his face, thankful that his mastery of Excel and Javascript did the talking for him. He didn’t know how to do much as a functioning adult but he knew computers, and they gave him his own desk with three walls and a tiny plant and let him fill his mind with numbers and shove everything else out, and he was  _ happy  _ there. He could do this, he could have a life after  _ her.  _ He’d be alright. 

On the third day of his fourth week there a new hire was assigned the desk connected to his, a tall blonde guy built like a bookcase with fluffy curls and Weird Al wire frames perched on his big nose. He looked like he just got an unfair parking ticket every time he came in for work, face angry and screwed up into a pout. He didn’t say a word to Theo until about a week in, when he’d startled him away from a project with a gruff  _ “Your hair is weird.”  _ Theo had no clue how to respond so he just… didn’t, working through his work load and stewing in increasing anxiety until he escaped for his mandatory forty minute break, convinced the new guy hated him and mentally running the logistics of finding a new job and making what little food he had last until he did so.  He’d come back from his lunch break to a sticky-note on his desk that said in tight, block-y script, ‘I meant interesting. Your hair is interesting. Sorry. I’m Matt.’, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. 

He was there a year before he met the owner of the company, but it had only taken two minutes of vague introduction and a shake of his hand to realize something was… odd about him. 

His name was Armitage Hux and he was the founder of the company, rumored to run his business as cold and calculatingly as surgeon or a military general or something equally frightening. In reality he was tall, kind of reedy and thin, with bright red hair and the exact same face as Theodore H. 

Matt was the one who pointed it out, and from the lingering looks Mr. Hux gave him as he walked past their desk on his routine branch tour he wasn’t the only one who thought so. The day came to an end and Mr. Hux left off back to the main branch, but over the course of the next year and a half he made more and more frequent trips to their humble little egg-white building in Baltimore, and another six months to broach the subject. 

It was one of the most excruciatingly uncomfortable conversations he can remember ever having, but after exchanging a few sob stories and an entire bottle of horrible (but expensive) brandy, they’d cracked both their lives open and slotted the pieces together, a strange mosaic coming to life.   

Theo’s mother had been a prostitute, as it turns out, whose company Mr. Hux’s father often sought out, hidden from Mrs. Hux. Theo’s mother thought he loved her, was told they would run away together, but Mr. Hux’s father took the news of her unexpected pregnancy poorly and cut off all contact, afraid his wife would find out. She had known all along, or so Armitage said, and when Theo’s mother had come to their home to try and confront him, Armitage’s mother used it as her chance to cut ties once and for all. She ran away to Italy, apparently, and Brendol shut Theo’s mother out of his life for good. Armitage had been four at the time, and a few weeks later Theo was crying and squirming in the back seat of a Buick on his way to a family that didn’t really want him. 

So Armitage had grown up without a mother and with a father who spoke to him less than he spoke to the maid staff at their home, and Theo had grown up with no father and with a monster who made him call her Ma-Ma. Over drinks and more tears than either of them would care to admit were shed their paths joined permanently. The next day Theo packed all of his things into a duffle bag and moved into Armitage’s sleek and modern home that he shared with his partner, and so commenced the first day of the rest of their lives as a family, broken and battered but whole at last.

Matt… Well. Matt had been a less traumatizing but equally life-altering chain of events that led them from exchanging sticky-notes and ticking down the minutes at work to sitting on the couch every other day with Theo’s feet tucked under Matt’s gym-toned ass, alternating between stealing kisses in front of whatever was on Netflix and shouting over Xbox games. 

Now he stands outside his and Armitage’s (and Ben’s and also kinda sorta Matt’s because he basically lives there too, he’s there often enough) mailbox with his hand gripping the little sun-warmed metal door with purpose. A warm wind buffets through his hair and the trees that line the street gently rustle and rasp, and he feels like he’s standing on the edge of something he can’t see the bottom of. He’s someplace high up, one foot poised to step out, and whatever is behind that little door will decide whether he steps onto something solid or falls tumbling into the void. 

He takes a deep breath, wrenches open the little door. It’s empty, and irritatingly he feels somewhere between the two; suspended in mid-air and unable to parse out any sort of bearings. Why can’t anything in his life ever just  _ make sense?  _

A few months ago he’d found some sort of courage and resolve inside himself (and probably too much hard lemonade in his brother’s fridge) and he’d privately set in motion a process he’d been talking himself into and out of for the better part of two years. He’d have all the documents signed a printed and then he’d psych himself out and rip them up at the last minute, or ‘accidentally’ forget part of the address and put it through a shredder when the post returned it to him. Finally he’d found the courage, but it seems like it’s still in the universe’s hands, Theo himself left to hover at the fringes of transition until something does or doesn’t come in the mail. It’s stressing him the  _ fuck  _ out. 

Dejected he walks back up the driveway and up the porch steps, ready to try at a smile and suggest he and Matt cajole Ben into playing Catan with them. He only gets as far as the front room before running into Matt, leaning in the kitchen doorway with a box of Yoohoo held to his lips in one hand a large and official looking envelope in the other. His eyes snap to it and are held there, stuck. 

“This came for you today, I checked earlier.” He sucks noisily on the little plastic straw, holds out the envelope. “My Dexter Blu-rays still aren’t here, fuckin’ bullshit.”

Theo just stares at the orange of the paper in Matt’s outstretched hand but doesn’t, can’t move to take it. Matt falters. 

“...You okay Ted?” He straightens up out of the door jamb, pulls the package closer to his face. “What is this anyway?”

Theo jolts into awareness, darting out a hand to snatch the envelope away before Matt can look to close and ask him questions he doesn’t really have answers to. 

“Nothing, it’s, it’s nothing, I’m just gonna-” He’s backing out the front door the way he’d came, Matt squinting at him with chocolate milk on his chin. “I’m gonna go open this, alone, on the porch. Yep. Everything is, uh, everything is fine, I’ll be. Right back.”

He ducks back out the door before he can butcher basic sentence structure any further and he heaves a breath when Matt, charitably, doesn’t follow. 

It’s calm, out on the porch; late afternoon drapes the smooth floorboards in an amber swathe of warmth, the trees continue to whisper gently just on the edge of hearing, and the porch swing creaks slow and even as it sways in the breeze. He tries to make his insides settle down enough to not disrupt the serenity as he steps out into it, with bare feet and a bare heart beating with desperation to belong. 

He moves to sit in a patch of sun, the envelope over his knees and his hands shaking only a little, and he steadies himself. He knows how he  _ wants _ this thing in his hands to make him feel, but only ripping off the band-aid will tell what emotional metamorphosis it will bring. 

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath.

 

\--

 

It’s almost an hour later when Matt creaks open the screen door, and he still hasn’t opened it.

At some point he moved from the swing to the warm wood of the deck, and he’s tucked up against the railing with his knees pulled to his chest. He’s looking out into the neighborhood, watching the dusk catch flame in the whispering trees and the roofs of houses, keeping happy families warm inside. 

“Babe…? You doing alright out here?” Matt asks, tentatively coming to drop down behind him, almost close enough to touch. 

Theo doesn’t look at him when he answers. “Hmm. Maybe? Can’t tell yet.”

Matt is silent for a minute. Theo can tell his eyebrows are all bunched up in thought like they get, without even looking at him. It makes him smile. 

“Theodore, What’s in the envelope?”

Theo sighs, the edge of the growing shadow on the porch just barely reaching his toes. It’s always been easier to show Matt things, not to tell, and now he’s come out to corner him and it really is now or never. He slides the thing across the floor towards him, face up. 

“Official State Documents enclosed, Human Resources and Welfare, Courthouse Committee of Family Relations,” Matt reads aloud, trailing off. “Teddy what-”

“Adoption papers.” Theo says, before he can panic and spit out a lie on reflex.  _ Relax,  _ he thinks,  _ Matt knows.  _ He half turns to look at him. “Family adoption, not like, Armitage being my dad or something. And, okay, I know it’s dumb, I’m almost twenty-six, but-” He cuts off on a wobbly breath when he feels Matt’s resolve to give him space break and he takes one of Theo’s hands tightly in his. 

“It’s  _ not  _ dumb,” Matt sounds furious which means he’s getting emotional too, and Theo’s heart swells even as he can’t look at him. “It’s  _ not  _ dumb, baby, it’s not dumb at all.”

He starts rubbing a thumb across the back of Theo’s hand in calming circles, and he’s quiet when he asks, “Why haven’t you opened them?”

_ Good fucking question.  _ “I guess I just…” He steels himself, picks at his cuticles. “I know that nothing can change the past, what happened. I  _ know  _ that. But. I’m afraid of feeling like the papers will somehow change something anyway, of wanting them to, and being crushed when they, when they don’t. When nothing changes.”  

They’re silent for a minute, Theo clumsily spinning the scratchy wool of his thoughts into lumpy, equally scratchy words. Matt looks like he wants to pull Theo to his chest or drive straight to Jessup to break a certain inmate’s nose, neither of which will help Theo right now. Matt’s silence despite the emotion rolling off of him in waves spurs him on more than anything. 

“And like, what if it  _ does?  _ What if, what if I open them and it flips a switch, I stop feeling like a glove in the sock drawer, like I  _ fit  _ now? I know it’s stupid to be afraid I  _ know  _ that but…” He sucks in a watery breath. “I don’t know if I’m ready to have this thing I’ve always wanted. All of this, all at once.”  _ I don’t know if I deserve to.  _

“It’s not though.” Matt’s voice lands heavy and sure, severing the dark spiral of his thoughts. “It’s not all at once.”

Theo blinks up at him, face scrunched up in confusion mirroring Matt’s own. He turns towards him, facing him now, his back against the porch railing.

“What?”

Matt reaches out a hand to tug on the sleeve of his cardigan in answer. “Who gave you this?”

“...Rey,” He answers, slow and unsure. She’d gotten it for him on his birthday the year before, told him she saw it on the rack and that he just had to have it. It’s a bright and rustic yellow and patterned with honeycomb on the pockets and cuffs. The sleeves hang over his hands just like he likes. 

“Uh-huh.” Matt says firmly, then nudges his foot with one of his own. “These?”

Theo wiggles his toes in his socks, forest green and thickly knit for warmth. He shoots Matt a look. “You did, they were in my stocking. Matt, what-” 

“Who’s  _ house  _ are we sitting in front of right now?” Firm, a blend of angry-passionate unique to Matt. Theo flinches, just a little. 

“It’s- Armitage’s house, and Ben’s, I don’t see-”

“ _ Yours,  _ Teddy! This is your house too, don’t you know that by now?”

That pulls Theo up short, and he blinks over at Matt, digesting what he’s half-shouted into the dying sunlight. He’s never thought of this place as any sort of his, as something he can claim as his own and keep. He’s  _ wanted  _ that, for this to be his forever-home, but he could never quite convince his brain to loosen its grip on thinking of his brother’s house as a pit stop; the best he’s ever known, sure, but always just another stop on the neurotic and anxiety-riddled bus ride that is his life. Before he can try and shove any words out his mouth that can fit around this blossoming eclipsing feeling in his chest Matt continues. 

“You have a place, T, a spot where you fit, and it’s right here.” His gaze is like lead on fire, heavy and burning. Impossibly wet at the edges. 

“You have cousins now, aunts who drink too much on Christmas, a mailman who knows your face, nieces. Whatever relation Poe’s dog counts as.” Theo snorts around the lump in his throat. “You have a brother who loves you more than anything, two, counting Ben. You have,” Matt reaches out again, twines his fingers slowly with Theo’s, holds him tight. Tethered. “You have me.” 

_ Who loves you that much, too,  _ his eyes say. The hand in his echos the words. 

He catches the breeze and his cheeks are colder than they were, tears chilling his face even as they roll hot down to his chin. He can’t push the words out, just squeezes Matt’s hand and nods like that will be enough. 

Matt hears him not-speaking and because he’s Matt, he  _ knows,  _ he keeps talking until Theo can.

“I know that it’s hard, to see yourself where you are instead of where you were. Sort of. If that makes sense.” He looks like he’s looking at a page-long calculus problem and he’s rubbing hard at his eyes with the heel of his other hand, and Theo loves him terribly. “You have a family that’s all yours, outside of her, that she can never  _ ever  _ touch, and they’re for life. You’re stuck with us. And no piece of paper is ever gonna change that, okay?”

Matt’s forest fire gaze and the rest of his face swims in his vision as tears start to fall in earnest, racing down his face and flying off to make dark spots on his pants as he nods, getting harder and more frantic. He doesn’t need some judge’s permission to have a family, to open birthday gifts and cook dinner side by side at the stove and sing loudly in the car and to love them with everything he has. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him he’s allowed to be loved in return, that he deserves what he’s been holding tight for the past three years, afraid of it being ripped away. Now, he sees that he’s not the only one holding tight to this patchwork family, all of its pieces are holding onto  _ him _ just as tightly; Armitage, Ben, Ben’s cousin Rey, her boyfriend Finn and their friend Poe, Ben’s mom and dad, Armitage’s cousin Stensland. Matt. If he slips, if he falls, there are so, so many hands reaching out to catch him. 

He’s crying in earnest now, chest heaving, and he pulls Matt’s hand to his chest, wraps around his arm like he’ll fall if he doesn’t. Matt immediately scoots closer and wraps him in his arms, close and warm and safe as he lets out all his pent up heartache messily into the place where his neck meets his shoulder. 

Matt rubs a hand long and slow across his back, over and over, and eventually the well is dry. He has no more tears, his head is pounding and his eyes itch, but he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face if he tried. He’s here, he’s loved, he’s  _ home.  _

He lifts his head and burrows closer, pulling in a long, even breath where his nose is buried in Matt’s hair. He holds it for a few seconds, then lets out what feels like every breath he’s ever taken in his whole life up to now. When he sucks air back into his lungs for the first time it seems to pass his teeth without catching on them, soft and easy and right. Natural, like his make-believe robot heart just needed one good thump and now he’s running smoothly, up to code. 

He chokes out a laugh, almost feeling foreign on his tongue. It’s already done everything he needed it too, the envelope, and he hasn’t even opened it.

He pulls away only far enough to press a slow kiss to Matt’s cheek, in love and in thanks and in every feeling bouncing around inside his ribs and vying to get out. Their eyes fall at the same time to the discarded package, and Theo stretches out a foot to drag it closer, not willing to loosen his hold on the Matt-shaped part of his home. 

Looking down at it now, he feels nothing but a warm and static-y wave of relief wash over him. 

“Go on,” Theo says, smile as much in his voice as on his face. “You open it. I think I’m ready now.”

Matt strokes his thumb across Theo’s jawline for a minute longer, giving him a searching look, before pulling away slightly to reach for the envelope. He carefully undoes the little string tying it closed, and with one hand still settled at the small of Theo’s back he pulls the official document free. 

“Wow,” Matt croaks, suddenly choked up. “I… I can’t believe you did that.” Tears slide around the wide arc of Matt’s toothy grin as he reads Theo’s new name, in solid black ink and framed in gold. Official.  _ Theodore Bear Hux.  _

Matt gently sets the paper down and squeezes Theo tight, like he really is the ginger teddy bear that Matt has been playfully calling him for years, almost from that very first sticky-note on his desk. “I’m gonna edit my speech there,” Matt says, nosing at the crown of Theo’s head. “The  _ only  _ thing that piece of paper has any say over is that you now have the coolest middle name in the entire world. It’s literally down in writing, there’s no topping that.”

Theo’s bark of laughter is unexpected and louder than it probably should be, but he doesn’t care one bit, wrapped up in Matt’s arms and sitting on his brother’s front porch.  _ His  _ front porch.  

Night settles in around them, the last of the sunlight slipping away like paint-water down a drain. Inside the lights flick on, spilling out from the windows and bathing them in a different kind of light. He’s home, and he has time yet to savor the light on his skin and the man in his arms.

 

\--

 

He never did find out if Ma-Ma got parole. Last year, hell, even last  _ week  _ the crushing weight of not knowing would have driven him up a wall with panic, but now his new name hangs framed inside his new house, where his new family lives. He sees it every time he walks past the dining room to feed Millicent, or to put his mug in the sink that his brother brought him tea in because he knows he doesn’t drink enough. To kiss Matt goodnight when he stays over, too tall for the couch and his legs dangling off the armrest.

He still has his scars, and he still has bad dreams sometimes. He still gets anxious, still fidgets, still counts his breaths and the beads on the bracelet that he never takes off. His past is his past, that will never change, but he’s finally coming to realize that his future can be whatever he wants it to be. 

And whatever it brings, he’ll have his family there, holding him up. 

**Author's Note:**

> buuuh, these boyssss!! I know, me too y'all.
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr](https://multi-purpose-tool-guy.tumblr.com) if you fancy, and drop me a comment maybe, let me know what you think? <3


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